Monthly Archives: May 2016

Week 2: Technohegemony and a Teen Audience

Before answering the explicit questions posed in this prompt, I’d like to devote some of my response to addressing the issues Dr Noble raised in her essay and the larger issues implicated in a discussion of technology, the hegemony, and the inscription of gender, racial, and socioeconomic identities.

To begin, while I found Dr Noble’s work on this subject to be so brilliant and well-argued, I also found it somewhat devastating. I’d like to think that I knew, that I have always known on some level, that ideology works through all systems and all institutions, and that we are interpolated by every “voice” that speaks through these hegemonic mouthpieces. I’d like to think that I knew that the internet (and technology more generally) is not and has never been a “neutral” space inside of this. And yet, I also know that on some level I was comfortable operating under the fiction (a known-fiction) that whether in its coding or in its hardware, technology might somehow be able to exist outside of the ideologies endemic in these hegemonic systems. Dr Noble’s work threw into sharp relief how misguided and even dangerous a belief in this fiction of technological neutrality can be. I, like many of you, not only use Google, but I actually quite like it as well: its algorithms have lead me to breakthroughs in my own research and it has helped me discover some incredibly productive databases, tools, archives, etc. I’ve only listed its academic uses here, the mundane tasks whose completion is predicated on Google notwithstanding.

All of this in itself induced a sort of existential dread at the realization that (yet again) no space is safe or devoid of the workings of the hegemony (and further, its endemic sexism, racism, classism, all manner of bigotry). I willingly participate in these systems because they are convenient and because I have been conditioned to rely on their use, i.e. I am wholly dependent on them. A sort of malaise lingered for a few days after Dr Noble’s address to the class. I am not mimicking the cynicism the prompt so rightly predicts for rhetorical effect: I felt (feel) all of this and more. So how best to combat this in a “younger, less knowledgeable audience?” I haven’t the slightest idea (though I noticed Gabe posted a very comprehensive response to this question, so I shall have to read his post after I complete mine). I do however have some theories as to how to “translate” these concepts and concerns into a language that young people / the technologically illiterate might better understand (though is it fair to conflate the two?). I see the biggest obstacle to this task is how “normalized” this sort of technology has become. Though I will be the first to admit that I am dependent on Google (and other instruments of the technohegemony) for so many day to day tasks, I can still remember a time before the internet. This is in fact not the case with the freshman I taught last semester. I will use them as my fictional “audience” in this post, as they are the only age group with which I have had any professional teaching experience. The internet (and technology more generally) has become so enmeshed in their social, academic, and professional lives that I believe there must be a process of “defamiliarizing” those technologies. Without exposing to them the inworkings of these platforms, attempting to convince them of their function in maintaining and perpetuating a dominant ideology would be akin to arguing that a toaster or a Kitchenaid is an instrument of the hegemony (which in itself could be the subject of another blog post). This means, yes, “deconstructing” these devices — explaining that while hardware, software, and firmware coalesce in a single “object” (be it an iPhone, Macbook, or tablet), they not only serve distinct functions but each is bound up with its own implicit ideological machinations. This presupposes some knowledge of how these component parts work. I would advocate for the need to teach CompSci classes throughout a child’s education or at least provide some exposure to it. In understanding how something “works” even at a most basic level, I believe one is better able to see and understand the “work” that it is doing.

However, were this audience unable to understand the more technologically advanced cant resultant from “deconstructing” those devices, disrupting the idea that Google is in some way “neutral” would be a necessary first step. Perhaps likening “code” to our own “genetic coding” would be a helpful metaphor: while our genome is a random assemblage of nucleobases and hydrogen bonding, whose “mutations” and “genes” are selected for based on their advantageousness or viability, Google’s “genome” is designed, i.e. its “code” has been deliberately written. And could they imagine if someone — not an infallible deity and not chance, but a flesh and blood person with their own prejudices and assumptions and biases — were to “write their own code?” Would it not stand that what was being “encoded” would be the construct of an imperfect, ideologically-driven mind? Would it not stand that the product of such a mind would carry, however subtly, those same prejudices in its very genes? Andrew Feenberg’s essay “Democratic Rationalization: Technology, Power, and Freedom” posits this another way: “Technologies are selected… from among many possible configurations. Guiding the selection process are social codes established by the cultural and political struggles that define the horizon under which the technology will fall. Once introduced, technology offers a material validation of the cultural horizon to which it has been preformed. I call this the ‘bias’ of technology: apparently neutral, functional rationality is enlisted in support of the hegemony” (147). It is of course not “natural selection” to which he refers but a deliberate “selection” that is guided by “social codes” which participate in and stem from the dominant ideological ordering of the world.

I think the danger here is making this all seem so nefarious, so explicit and intentional: while this audience might resist a the claim that racial bias in Google’s search algorithm is deliberate, they perhaps would be more receptive to thinking of it as something operating outside of or perhaps below intentionality. In other words I believe figuring Google as some deliberately manipulative “Evil Corporation” would be met with resistance because it is such an essential and productive tool, so ingrained into day-to-day processes, that to insult Google would be to insult people’s dependence upon it. Further to this, in discussing the production and reproduction of “ideology,” I think most would assume that this is enacted by means of “repressive” instruments, or that which “prohibits” or “impedes” an exchange of information or belief, whereas Google is viewed by many as an instrument of “liberation” in this regard. It is too easy to eschew subtlety in favor of making powerful, impactful claims, especially when the process of fleshing out those subtleties can prove so daunting, but in making this a complex issue wherein Google at once participates in and reinforces the hegemony (footnote: I fully believe that the “hegemony” is a concept that can be explained to a “teen” audience, as I subjected my nineteen-year-old sister to a discussion of it last Easter break and my Rhetorical Arts class seemed to grasp the concept last semester), but perhaps does so on a level slightly below the deliberate instantiation of hegemonic values might better serve the audience we are attempting to address.

And if they are perhaps not so keen on the “genome” metaphor I’ve constructed here, perhaps it would be best to focus on the assumptions that they have about the way Google indexes websites, to dismantle the “vote and rank” supposition that is so prevalent in people’s minds. Regardless of the course, I think central to all of this is having conviction in the students’ ability to grasp this material. Complex issues, whether they are about technology or ideology or the way in which these two intersect, should not be reduced to platitudes or generalizations. Rather, they should be worked through in a language and with a patience that intervenes in a reductive “Google = Bad” narrative. Not because this claim doesn’t possess value or merit, but because attacking Google as a product or as a service might alienate those who are dependent on its use. Further to this, to suppose there are limits to what individuals are “capable” of understanding merely reinforces those same limits. As I said, I don’t think I can address latter half of this prompt. I’m effected by the same cynicism (though I’m not sure if its cynicism, so much as resignation and exhaustion) after having been forced to confront a fact I already knew to be true. If anyone has any ideas about how to help the “audience” we are meant to be working with here (or myself for that matter), I’d certainly be open to ideas!

Category: Technology

Keywords: pedagogy; programming; ideology; algorithms

(interestingly, the Library of Congress uses Google to search their own cache of Subject Headings)

Week 2: Baldwin and Noble’s Look Into Systems of Power

In The Fire Next Time, Baldwin asserts that the “white world” has formulated a mythology revolving America. Yet this mythology is one whose falseness the Black man is aware of although his countrymen (white world) has yet to come to that realization. For his (white) identity is embedded in that mythology and consequently so are their notions of blackness and to reveal it as such, to admit the mythology is just that, that it is a lie, a falsehood, to renege on what they have defined as blackness would be to give way to the factors with which they conceptualize whiteness. To expose it all as a lie would be to destroy the very foundations of the white identity. It would be an erasure of America and consequently of whiteness. Yet Baldwin seems to suggest that only this would allow for Blacks to emerge from the state of invisibility that they have been condemned to and therefore provide for a mutual state of freedom. Yet the erasure of this mythology is therefore highly problematic for whites for once they are devoid of this binary and the mythology of what America is, with this mirror that reflects only the self and no other what would be seen? I think both Baldwins and Noble’s works speak to issues of representation and the manner in which mythologies are created to serve one group. The systems that create them then gain and maintain power by marginalizing others and Noble demonstrates the manner in which our current society contributes to that. Noble’s research on Google demonstrated how it facilitates and allows its biased searches to be thought of as neutral and how this perpetuates negative representations and essentially the silencing of Black women.

America much like the internet or Google, has made commodities out of the black body so much so that their defining features and characteristics revolve around notions that uphold and perpetuate those falsified and negative definitions of blackness. The supposed neutrality of technology can also be thought of as part of the mythology that surrounds the internet. It was hailed as a space of neutrality that would facilitate a new age of acceptance and understanding yet as Noble has demonstrated it is anything but that. In so the interests of large corporations, such as the Porn industry, are reflected in searches that involve Black women. This conversion of Black women into girls who have been coded as a sexual objects is mistakenly believed to be a result that reflects the unbiased response of an algorithm;the truth is that financial gain on behalf of the Porn industry is truly what is generating said results. These results and the misconception or the mythology of the commercial search engines- Google, then work to misrepresent Black women, objectifying them and I would venture to say perpetuating notions that predate the institution of slavery. What came to my mind when Professor Noble spoke was the manner in which sexuality became an easy way in which to dehumanize, oppress and essentially work towards conceptualizing as an “other”, different racial/ethnic groups. The stereotypical depiction of the Black woman as a Jezebel for example, reduced them to a body and largely rendered them invisible. I would venture to say that the biases of Google similarly aid in marginalizing Black women. Here we can see how our post civil rights society, who sometimes boasts of progress by claiming colorblindness, continues to propel negative definitions of blackness. In so both Nobel and Baldwin call for an acknowledgement from these systems and an erasure of the mythology that aids in perpetuating said notions.

LC Terms: History of the Americas, United States local history, Historiography, Afro Americans , Status and development since emancipation, Political history, Slavery in the United States, Twentieth Century
B) My suggested terms: Counter History, White definitions of Blackness, Racism, Oppressive systems of Power.
Terms that I believe match those in my suggested list: Psychoanalysis and racism, white supremacy movements—United States, Technology and women, Race 

Week 2: Challenging the Dominant Tech, a Lesson Plan

For a lesson plan to be most effective, there should be a goal achieved by the end by both the instructor and the students. At a high school level class, I believe the best way to approach the topic of Google is through the technology that we utilize of theirs every day, driving the point that it has already infiltrated and dominated our lives. The goal then of this lesson plan is to allow the students to be at least aware, at most cynical about the activities that Google produces in them, and an awareness of the value of good research (this coming from a Teaching Fellow that just spent a semester with Freshmen asking them to conduct sound and detailed research). As I said, I think the best way to do this is through the use of the product, and so I would go Google Chrome, which I do believe is the best search engine with the ease of my tailored needs, and explain that to the students, along with the access and programs available through a free Google account is incredible: Google drive to create, store and share all your documents, slideshows, graphs, tables, and more, which is of great importance as we have discovered in a digital age to have backups of everything available online (Box, Dropbox, and others are examples of non-Google driven storage).  Next, I would pull up YouTube, the Google owned and extremely dominant video upload cite, to pull search the video “Google Don’t Be Evil”. The first video that pops up is this: “Google’s Plan for World Domination.” Please, take a look.  

Questions that I would use to lead discussion begin with “what did this video explain to you?”; “were you surprised by any of this, or did you already understand what Google has been doing/is capable of?”; and “Is this something to truly be concerned of, or is the convenience of Google more appealing than the thought of their selling of information?”

One of the key moments that Dr. Noble put forth, in easy to grasp language was that “we are Google’s product” one that they sell to marketers. Using this key term to frame the last question would make it easier for students, I believe, to begin to grasp the “man behind the curtain” aspect. To push it further, I would then remind students of my own Google account, which I signed on to at the beginning of class to show the pure ease of Google, but would begin to challenge this.  I turn to Dr. Nobel’s writing on the subject: “A 2011 study by Martin Feuz, Matthew Fuller, and Felix Stalder found that personalization is not simply a service to users, but rather a mechanism for better matching consumers with advertisers, and that Google’s personalization or aggregation is about actively matching people to groups; that is, categorizing individuals. Personalization is, to some degree, giving people the results they want based on what Google knows about its users, but it is also generating results for viewers to see that Google calculates might be good for its advertisers. As a result of these practices, increasing attention is being paid to how the Internet acts as the space within which the attention, desires, and free labor of users are harnessed into surplus value.”  This explanation would be the basis of the lesson that Google not only sells your search results, but also sell the information displayed to the highest bidder, which was explained to us in Noble’s discussion. Not only this, but programmers of these sites are able to rig the system of the algorithm through the use of hyper linking or “Googlebombing” as the term was used in Noble’s work. 

This is then the major challenge to the understanding, or ideology of the students in regards to the seemingly “unbiased” “purely mathematical algorithmic” and “unintentional” searches that Google (and other search engines) are producing. Once these thoughts are challenged, it is the time for the issue of identity to begin to step into the class. Some challenging questions to put forth: with this understanding that Google is able to sell the spot to the highest bidder, or that people are able to rig the system, what does this mean about your search results?; What if you were searching for information in regards to your ethnic background, to understand more of your family’s history maybe?; The results that come up may very well be true, but now do you out right trust them to be the only truth? Or would you begin to dig deeper, now that you understand that Google’s systems are at best broken and fixable, at most rigged by “the man”.  In guiding their responses, I would end this portion of the discussion focused on the quickly crumbling building blocks of identity and how it is displayed by the Internet through the language of Grimmes and Warf as brought further by Nobel:  “Much of the Internet’s use, for commercialism, academic, and military purposes, reinforces entrenched ideologies of individualism and a definition of the self through consumption. Many uses revolve around simple entertainment, personal communication, and other ostensibly apolitical purposes… particularly advertising and shopping but also purchasing and marketing, in addition to uses by public agencies that legitimate and sustain existing ideologies and politics as “normal,” “necessary,” or “natural.” Because most users view themselves, and their uses of the Net, as apolitical, hegemonic discourses tend to be reproduced unintentionally…Whatever blatant perspectives mired in racism, sexism, or other equally unpalatable ideologies pervade society at large, they are carried into, and reproduced within, cyberspace.” 

By now the student’s minds should be blown, and they can begin to distrust the system that is in place, and that ultimately they can look past the first page of results, begin to look at multiple searches, use multiple key words/terms, and not just be focused on the latest and greatest that the Internet has to offer. This can then be tied into their personal rhetorical skills, looking for the unseen morass of how people have been able to buy and sell their products, positions, and ultimately their ideologies through advertisements and articles that push their agenda through the dollars they spend upon the number one Google ranking. 

(Library of Congress Category: Technology>Information Technology. Or
Sociology> Social Systems, or Social  Control.)

Week 2: Teaching Bias in Technology

The illusion of neutrality and machine-like objectivity are definitely understandings which permeate the use of technology. However, our discussion of the prejudice enmeshed with the algorithms in search engines like Google was something that made perfect sense to me. I don’t know a lot about algorithms or the way search engines function, but Dr. Noble’s explanation of “the man behind the curtain” was certainly easy enough for me to understand and sequentially evaluate. Therefore, I am under the impression that the difficulty in teaching bias in Google to undergraduates may be overestimated.

That being said, I was also reminded of the first time I came across scholarly work on the fact that technology is not neutral in Theory of Teaching, a mixed class of undergraduates and graduates, where we read Cynthia L. Selfe and Richard J. Selfe, Jr.’s 1994 article “The Politics of the Interface: Power and Its Exercise in Electronic Contact Zones”.  Cynthia L. Selfe and Richard J. Selfe, Jr. argue that computer interfaces create and perpetuate divides within society. They write:

The rhetoric of technology obscures the fact that, within our current educational system — even though computers are associated with the potential for great reform — they are not necessarily serving democratic ends. Computer interfaces, for example, are also sites within which the ideological and material legacies of racism, sexism, and colonialism are continuously written and re-written along with more positive cultural legacies (743). 

They go on to say that part of the way that interfaces, “order the virtual world according to a certain set of historical and social values that make up our culture,” is because of the fact that they have “grown out of the predominately male, white, middle-class, professional cultures associated with the military-industrial complex” (Selfe 745). The interfaces, as Cynthia and Richard Selfe have identified, reflect this demographic. They give examples of the terminology associated with modern capitalism and “white-collar inhabitants” of corporate culture such as “desktop,” “files,” “documents,” etc. They argue that the use of these terms to identify functions of the computer are a distinct reflection of the powerful ideology capitalism values and perpetuates.

For me, the author’s arguments were generally convincing, and impactful but I took issue with their suggestion that a “domestic” interface may better serve “women in the home” (746). However, the undergraduate students in the class were not persuaded at all, and openly laughed off the authors’ critique of the “the white pointer hand . . .  ubiquitous in the Macintosh primary interface.” The students couldn’t seem to get past the dated nature of the article in conjunction with some of the examples, and missed the important message. This instance is representative of the major difficulty in asking undergraduates to be critical of, and take seriously, the racial, and/or gender bias and capitalistic imperatives wrapped up in in technology. 

It’s possible that, because it is dated, the Selfe article isn’t the best way to get the message of biased technology across to younger students. I think the key is to stay very current, and to use live examples that hit home for students. For instance, Dr. Noble’s example of typing the word “beautiful” into Google images and the results being singularly white women is unquestionably problematic. Alternatively, spending class time examining search suggestions, like the ones in Dr. Noble’s presentation, would be equally impactful. 

While I wouldn’t use it to teach undergraduates, the takeaway from the Selfe article, that instructors must actively take every opportunity to teach their students and their colleagues to be critical of technology, is incredibly important and something for all instructors to follow: “We have to educate them to be technology critics as well as technology users. This recognition requires that composition teachers acquire the intellectual habits of reflecting on and discussing the cultural and ideological characteristics of technology — and the implications of these characteristics — in educational contexts” (743). 

a.) Category: Technology 

b.) Original Keywords: “teaching” “technology” “pedagogy” “algorithms” “google”
LC Terms: (I’m not sure if I was unable to work the website properly or if something was wrong with the search engine, my computer, or otherwise, but I didn’t get any results when I searched any of these terms.) 

Week 2: Lesson Plan – Google, Hegemony, Systemic Bias

Library of Congress Category: Information Resources, subclass ZA – either Information Superhighway (!), Electronic Information Resources, or Computer Network Resources

Library of Congress Subject Headings:
suggested: search engines, hegemony, neo-liberalism, computer algorithms (all 4 found!)

Here’s my lesson plan/outline for presenting some of Dr. Noble’s work with Google as a tool of hegemonic oppression, especially in the visibility of young Black women. Much of how I structured it was based on Dr. Noble’s talk, but more simplified and with more verbal and written prompts for student participation, which I find to be a little more compatible with the high school classroom.

I. Hook/Intro – Start with brainstorm (silently jot down responses/ideas in your notes):
        A. How has Google search changed our lives for the better? After a few minutes, field student responses (examples will probably include “easier access to information,” “satisfies curiosity” “more convenience, better planning in day-to-day concerns)
        B. How could Google search be having some sort of negative effect on people? What are the drawbacks to its ubiquity in our current culture? And, just like in A, field student responses (examples could include “we’re becoming more reliant on it for basic facts,” “we’re more and more likely to just skim things, look for simpler answers,” or something with Google’s commercial interests)

II. There are several things we don’t see/think about with Google, (much of which I hadn’t thought about before reading Dr. Noble’s article and seeing her presentation, so these are new concepts for me, as well).
        A. They’re a private company whose net worth was estimated at $82.5 billion. How is this revenue generated if the majority of Google’s top features (search, mail, etc.) are free? (field some guesses).
        B.  Google is a commercial search site run by a private company, not a public resource. Revenue is generated from targeted ads, particularly the ones at the side of our your search (show example with a harmless, generic Google search). As Dr. Noble points out, you are Google’s product, not their consumer.
             i. Are you familiar with the term ‘clickbait?” (Students explain/define the term, provide examples of clickbait headlines like “A policeman and a young black boy meet in the street. You won’t believe what happens next…”.) What’s the objective with these dumb headlines and articles? They generate revenue off of your web traffic, whether you were satisfied or not with the article itself.
             ii. Google search works in a similar way. The top results displayed are not the most popular, relevant, or authoritative sites, they’re the most commercially viable for Google.
                  a. This can undermine our belief in a ‘digital democracy,’ the belief that the internet, largely interfaced by search engines, almost exclusively Google at this point, can grant equal access to any content via search, privileging, just like a democratic system of government, only the content that is most popular, as measured by site ‘hits’ in this case.
                 b. In fact, results are sorted by vastly complex algorithms, which sort and list sites according to many, many different factors, in which site hits are just one.

        C. Google’s search engine is not a neutral tool. It reflects the biases, conscious and unconscious, of the engineers and other employees at Google who design these algorithms that make it run.
             i. To put it another way, see a quote from Siva Vaidhyanathan’s book “The Googlization of Everything” quoted in Dr. Noble’s article, “Rendering web content (pages) findable via search engines is an expressly social, economic, and human project”
              ii. We’ll examine the “N**** House” example from DeRay McKesson’s  tweet and we’ll listen to a clip from the NPR piece we listened to last week.
             iii. These are not glitches, they’re related to the demographic makeup of the engineers that design the algorithms. Look at this chart of info about Google’s tech employees in particular: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/google-discloses-workforce-diversity-data-good/ (83% male, 60% White, 3% Black and Latino). How can these statistics show that these “glitches” are not outliers? How can these gender and racial breakdowns lead to problems like the ones we just saw? (Implicit, unconscious bias, no one in the room to speak up/examine how these algorithms can have negative impact or examine the potential bias they would propagate)
              iv. This kind of problem is not unique to Google or engineers. It happens in all seats of influence when leaders are not demographically representative of the public they serve or  interface with.
                  a. Briefly discuss women’s bathrooms in congress chambers: http://content.usatoday.com/communities/onpolitics/post/2011/07/house-womens-bathroom-congress-/1#.V0sJVPkrLIU How do female members of congress not get their own bathroom until 1993 (when there were 55 of them, over 10% of the House) and not get it expanded to 4 (4!) stalls until 2011, when there were 96 of them, close to 20%? When women are underrepresented in this body, commonsense problems like this get overlooked.

        D. Google search results, just like other media images, can affect our worldviews, especially regarding disenfranchised groups.
            i. What images pop into your mind when you think of the word ‘beautiful?’ (jot down examples, share: sunset on the beach? Yosemite?) Then compare to Google image search. What impact will these results have on young people (girls AND boys)? Field student responses.
            ii. Do the same with the “black girls” search (with much of the content censored out for a high school classroom, of course). Discuss the impact of these search results on young Black women looking to find themselves represented, congregated on the internet, perhaps looking for feminism or empowerment, but they don’t have that vocabulary yet. Note, discuss the fact that the vast majority of us (show of hands in the room, mine included) don’t venture past the first search result page on Google.
            ii. Note that Google, of course, does not create these social inequalities, but it does perpetuate and over represent them within our society at large. Read them this quote included in Dr. Noble’s article: “Search technologies themselves and their design do not dictate racial ideologies; rather, they both reflect and re-instantiate the current social climate and prevailing social and cultural values. As users engage with technologies like search engines, they dynamically co-construct content within the technology itself.”(Christian Fuchs, “Labor in Informational Capitalism and on the Internet,” The Information Society, emphasis mine”). Discuss last part, how do we “co-construct” content on the internet? (clicks perpetuate more content like it, vicious circle of revenue and marketing)
            a. If these search results are put forth as the dominant narrative about young black girls, other critical voices and ideologies are rendered invisible, as well as the suppression of these other views.

III. So what can we do about this? Brainstorm concrete actions to combat these suppressions and propagations of biases with your partner. Share some with the group (Ideas could include: start a petition to pressure Google into making algorithms public/hiring more diverse staff of engineers along gender/racial lines, emphasizing noncommercial alternatives to search engines for finding information about underrepresented groups,  increasing public awareness about how Google’s invisible commercials interests affect results)
        A. Shock, discouraged, disillusioned by this context and the “man behind the curtain?” Remember, Google is private company, and reinforcing biases through product marketing is the driving force of their search engine business model (when trying to locate revenue and profit margins and revenue for just Google’s search engine, I was unable to pin down numbers on this as Google works very hard to keep these statistics hidden from the public view. The first three articles that come up in the search “Google search engine profits compared to other divisions” just discuss how Google is dominating the market over Bing and Yahoo https://www.ventureharbour.com/visualising-size-google-bing-yahoo/).
            i. Even if we don’t have concrete solutions YET, awareness and skepticism is the first step even as we engage with this technology**. All this information is new to me, too. I’m not sure what’s the best path forward in my own conscientious consumption of Google products, but it’s important to ask these questions of the largest corporations in our lives and of ourselves as daily consumers of these products.
             ii. Exit Slip (a few sentences, turn in response as you leave): What’s the one aspect of today’s talk that impacted you most and why? How might you use Google search or view your Google search results differently moving forward?

**Full disclosure: my high school is heavily invested in Google products. Every student has a Google run email, since the company provide free email servers to any school that chooses to use them. Every student is enrolled in at least one class that uses Google Classroom, an online class management and homework submission system with a blog-style interface very similar to our Digital Humanities WordPress. All the computers in our three mobile computer labs are Google Chromebooks (the 12 in the library are Google Chromebox desktops), and we’ve partnered with them in our 1-to-1 computing initiative started this year. By 2018, all enrolled students will be using their own Google Chromebooks in class daily.  

¶ Week 2: Questions

Required – Do the following after you have written your response:  

a.) Look at the Library of Congress Classifications and determine the category in which your post should go.

b.) Propose 4 keywords that most closely describe your post and search those terms in the Library of Congress Subject Headings database to see if they exist. For terms that are not already there, search for ones that most closely match them. Include both your original keywords and the LC terms in your post.

I realize using the LC is new to you.  Just do your best.

Answer at least one of the following:

1.) Last night’s discussion about Google was rich, intense and touched on a lot of complex issues. One of the many questions it raised for me was, how do you discuss this topic with people who are less literate in informatics, technology, issues of hegemony, etc.? In other words, how do discuss it with most people?

With my question in mind, explain how you as an instructor would present issues of bias in Google and other search engines to either high school students or undergrads. Consider the many layers of complexity that Dr. Noble raises in her article, “Google Search: Hyper-visibility as a Means of Rendering Black Women and Girls Invisible.” They include: the racist/sexist mindset embedded in algorithm design and the impact that such algorithms have on information findability, the fact that prejudicial content dominates the web, common information seeking behaviors (i.e. only reading the first page of search results), capitalistic interests, long established racist/sexist classification systems, and the illusion of objectivity. How would you break these concepts down and, essentially, translate them to a younger less knowledgeable audience? What basic takeaways would you want them to leave with? It’s hard not to feel cynical after seeing “the man behind the curtain” or The Man behind the Google. How would you handle this with your students? Should they feel cynical or something else? 

2.) Erasure and invisibility are recurring themes in Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time and are a central topic in Noble’s “Google Search: Hyper-visibility as a Means of Rendering Black Women and Girls Invisible.”

Baldwin writes: “The truth about the black man, as a historical entity and as a human being, has been hidden from him, deliberately and cruelly; the power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world’s definitions. So every attempt is made to cut that black man down — not only was made yesterday but is made today.” (69)

Noble writes: “At the heart of the public’s general understanding and trust in commercial search engines like Google, is a belief in the neutrality of technology—a technologically deterministic blind spot to the embedded social values in technology design itself—which only obscures our ability to understand the potency of misrepresentation that further marginalizes and renders the interests of Black women, coded as girls, invisible.”

Explore the parallels between their works, i.e. issues concerning hegemony, systems and power. Then discuss the similarities and differences in the way they address these issues. Are they essentially making the same argument? Or are there fundamental differences? How might Noble’s argument be the “today” of which Baldwin speaks?

 

 

Week 1: A “Current” Counter-history: How Jet Magazine Countered The New York Times

 

As is discussed in question 2 posed for this post, Hartman’s interesting goal in her writing is to present the untold history of slave women as being “inseparable from writing a history of the present” (Hartman 4).  Considering she writes based on documents over 150 years old, Hartman is bringing these texts and their “count-historical” truths forward to reflect upon the present, saying “by which I mean the incomplete project of freedom, and the precarious life of the ex-slave, a condition defined by the vulnerability to premature death and to gratuitous acts of violence” (Hartman 4). The incomplete project of freedom is a powerful and true statement for the black communities of America, who continue to attempt to address their issues of poverty, inequality advantages, and other issues, as was discussed by Anthony and Kevin in our class last Thursday. 

To continue with the theme of Hartman’s attempt to bring forward a counter-history of the events of the past, Wanda Coleman’s readings exemplified a horrendous act of violence against a black boy in 1955, Emmett Loius (Bobo) Till, who was kidnapped, beaten, murdered and his body dumped in a river to be found three days after his violent kidnapping from his grandfather’s home. Coleman’s discussion of the event stands as “the harbinger of social change (she) longed for” (252).  Till’s death was in a time of the growth of the Civil Rights Movement, but long before it hit the media, or the major movements of the protests (Montgomery Bus Boycott, or Freedom Riders), and 10 years (within the same month) of the Watts Uprising. 

It is in moments like Till’s death, where “gratuitous acts of violence” causes a counter-history to be traced most effectively, unfortunately. The article printed for The New York Times coverage of the murder is about a 200 word report, ending unapologetically with a statement of the pastor where the boy’s body was on display saying, “Pamphlets were passed out in front of the funeral parlor last night telling us what to do… These pamphlets were passed out by Communists. Pay no heed. We don’t need Communists.” At the end of a short, yet detailed blurb dedicated to the event of 10,000 black people gathering to mourn and see the horror of the first lynching in four years of a 14 year old boy, there is a warning that “We don’t need Communists.” It is well known American history that the “Red Scare” was taking place in the 1950s, and it may not have been questioned by the white community that would read this article, but for the black community who were reminded of the horrors of lynching, the depravity and fear with which they were submitting to the white community, this 200 word article is an insult, especially when looking at the placement of it, in the updates for shipping and weather reports of the nation, lost in the middle of niche nonsense. 

Jet magazine’s article, a two page spread with vivid photographs of the body, the family, and paraphernalia of the crime is not only a counter-history, but a proper news report of an event of this size. With details of the names of the accused, the full event of the whistling “incident” that lead to the kidnap and brutal murder, and details of the kidnapping taking place in the vacation home of Emmett Till, the true horror of the crimes are made clear, unlike the NYT ending in a warning of Communist activities. This is a moment that is reflected by Hartman’s words of “the precarious life of the ex-slave, a condition defined by the vulnerability to premature death and to gratuitous acts of violence.” Jet magazine, a black magazine, was providing the whole truth, because the white mainstream media was pushing the event to the shipping pages. Jet’s history should be seen as a more true history than the NYT. With its documentation alone it is the more significant source of historical fact, and without the passive-aggressive anti-communist influence of the Times article, it is less biased source, even if it is a black community magazine. As such, it stands as a counter history in the immediate moment, blatantly and ably providing an argument against the “history” as told by the white main stream media of the time. 

Week #1:Counter History

Hartman states, “…by re-presenting the sequence of events in divergent stories and from contested points of view, I have attempted to jeopardize the status of the event, to displace the authorized account, and to imagine what might have happened or might have been said” (11). In many ways the Jet article is doing exactly this, it is attempting to displace an authorized account. It serves as a counter history to the Times article because it is a revisiting and revision of the accounts otherwise told of Emmet’s murder. One can easily see the differences in the articles from the language utilized to the images or lack thereof. The Jet article disrupts the narrative most notably with images that offer everyone the opportunity to, in a sense, reconstruct the past by looking into the casket. 

The Times article is a censored version of the real story. It is brief and devoid of details choosing strategically the manner in which the instance is described. The title is “Slain Youth’s Body Seen by Thousands” whereas Jet titles their article “Nation Horrified by Murder”. The times article is surrounded with “business as usual” snippets of news while Jet grants this story a few pages. The Times article is guarded in its language describing everything very lightly, saying the boy was shot and beaten, but there is no mention of the fact that his face was crushed, that he was found with a 200 pound fan tied around his neck or that he was naked. Jet is the one who discloses those details and notes on the very bottom that despite rumors the child wasn’t castrated a real fear and an act reminiscent of the lynchings that were valorized in the south. The Times article includes as its last sentence the mention of Communists and if to further disconnect the reader from the reality of what occurred.

Ultimately,  Jet addresses that which the Times article would not, it revisits the violence and places it right before you. As Hartman says, “ My effort to reconstruct the past, is well, an attempt to describe obliquely the forms of violence licensed in the present, that is, the forms of death unleashed in the name of freedom, security, civilization and God/the good” (13). Jet’s article acts as a counter history because it too looks to the past for the purpose of affecting the present. Emmets murder was unleashed in the name of the “good”, for the “security” of the white woman and because of the freedom of two white men. The Jet article does very much what Hartman does to Venus, “ My account replicates the very order of violence that it writes against by placing yet another demand against the girl, by requiring that her life be made useful or instructive, by finding in it a lesson for our future or a hope for history” (14). Jet does a similar as the article revises the initial account, revisits the violence and ultimately requires that Emmet be a lesson for the future. 

Week 1: Saidiya Hartman’s Critical Fabulation

Though I initially dismissed the spectral presence of “speculation” in Hartman’s Venus in Two Acts (believing I was under the influence of my own recent engagements with speculative fiction, the speculative turn, the speculative solution to the problem of correlationalism), she explicitly names it towards the end of her piece:

Is it possible to exceed or negotiate the constitutive limits of the archive? By advancing a series of speculative arguments and exploiting the capacities of the subjunctive (a grammatical mood that expresses doubts, wishes, and possibilities), in fashioning a narrative, which is based upon archival research, and by that I mean a critical reading of the archive that mimes the figurative dimensions of history, I intended both to tell an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility of its telling (emphasis mine, 11).

What Hartman seems to suggest here is the potential for a type of historical speculation or “critical fabulation” as she calls it — the assertion that in speculating about the inaccessible, silenced voices of the past, one might be able to “tell an impossible story” while simultaneously amplifying the “impossibility of its telling” (11). The implications of this act are not merely confined to “counter-histories” but also a “history of the present… the incomplete project of freedom… [which is] a condition defined by the vulnerability to premature death and to gratuitous acts of violence” (4). Before fully exploring Hartman’s account of the latter, I’d like to work through her own engagement with this type of historical labour, as it has helped flesh out my own uncertainties about what it means to “retell” or “rewrite” the past. The recurrence of the words “impossible” and “impossibility” is difficult to ignore (both feature in this piece upwards of 20 times) and refer to the seeming futility of locating a voice for those “two girls” in the “archive of slavery.” It is simultaneously an act (a search? a voyage?) described as a “refashioning of disfigured lives… [a redressal of] the violence” (2); a “recuperation” and “conjuring” — a “resurrection” (3); a “compensation” and “reparation” (4). Its intent is not however “to give voice to the slave” in the face of the silent archive but to demonstrate “Narrative restraint, the refusal to fill in the gaps and provide closure… the imperative to respect black noise—the shrieks, the moans, the non-sense, and the opacity, which are always in excess of legibility” (12).

The first four pages of Hartman’s essay are filled with questions about the nature of her project, its value, its potential, its price. She offers up her own initial skepticism of a type of “speculative history” — “I feared what I might invent, and it would have been a romance” (8). Wary of the way in which the grotesqueries and acts of violence perpetrated on the bodies and minds of slaves were coopted by the language of spectacle (and how closely enmeshed spectacle and speculation are both practically and etymologically), Hartman in her fist discussion of “Venus” (Lose Your Mother) resists this impulse. But this resolves itself in her decision to engage in “fabulation” in “Venus in Two Acts:”

If I could have conjured up more than a name in an indictment, if I could have imagined Venus speaking in her own voice, if I could have detailed the small memories banished from the ledger, then it might have been possible for me to represent the friendship that could have blossomed between two frightened and lonely girls. Shipmates. Then Venus could have beheld her dying friend, whispered comfort in her ear, rocked her with promises, soothed her with “soon, soon” and wished for her a good return” (emphasis mine, 8).

Characteristic here are the “ifs” of the subjunctive tense, a narrative “fashioned,” a “critical reading” of that archive which had silenced Venus in the first place but also “mimetic” — intended to tell that which is “impossible” but never to deny the “impossibility” of its telling. Whereas before Hartman “chose not to tell a story about Venus because to do so would have trespassed the boundaries of the archive,” “Venus in Two Acts” seems to be her reckoning with those boundaries, an acknowledgement that the archive is just as much a fiction, constituted by “the rumors, scandals, lies, invented evidence, fabricated confessions, volatile facts, impossible metaphors, chance events, and fantasies… [that] determine what can be said about the past” (9).

This drew to mind Pierre Cassou-Nogues’s seminar on how speculative fiction or thought might be the solution to the inaccessibility of the “past.” For those of you who weren’t at the talk, I’ll try to focus on those elements of it that pertain to what I’m discussing in this blog post. Cassou-Nogues suggested that it is through “speculative narratives” that we might be able to answer what Quentin Meillassoux refers to as “ancestral questions” — those “histories” and “bodies” that predate human existence. Meillassoux suggests that because humanity had no experience with those “ancestral” events, it is impossible to truly “speak” about their existence; Cassou-Nouges responds that through a “speculative” act, those bodies might somehow be reclaimed. How this pertains to Hartman might seem tangential (and more than likely is), but I see “Venus in Two Acts” as a localization of this theory in the thread of a human narrative: those “histories” and “bodies” that predate this “modern moment” — “ancestral” in their inaccessibility, in their silence — are opened, retold, reimagined, rewritten, and resurrected within Hartman’s “critical fabulation.” How this might all relate to the original prompt might not necessarily be clear but implicit in a discussion of “speculative narratives” is the “speculative fiction” genre, which includes (as you might imagine) works of science fiction, fantasy, dystopia — narratives that “speculate” about the future of the human race and often seek to induce dread or caution, to catalyze change.

Hartman argues, and I am inclined to agree with her, that this potential for “change” is possible not only in speculations about the future but a speculative engagement with the past. “Counter-histories” and the “history of the present” are “inseparable” as they both touch on an “incomplete project of freedom” (4). Further to this, she believes that “a history of the present strives to illuminate the intimacy of our experience with the lives of the dead, to write our now as it is interrupted by this past, and to imagine a free state, not as the time before captivity or slavery, but rather as the anticipated future of this writing” (emphasis mine, 4). I have attempted to unpack this phrase as best I can, and I hold that there is are higher stakes than the mere claim that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The present is “interrupted” by the past — and is it this “interruption” that permits her to “imagine a free state… as the anticipated future of this writing.” At play here is not merely past and present but futurity: “this history has engendered me,” she writes and as a result, “the kinds of stories I have fashioned… bridge the past and the present” (4). She seeks to “dramatize the production of nothing” or rather throw into sharp relief the absence of narrative. That absence defines her, defines the “history of the present” that is currently being written, and in turn the history of “an alternative future” yet to occur (4, 14). “If this story of Venus,” Hartman’s name for her own “critical fabulation,” “has any value at all it is in illuminating the way in which our age is tethered to her” (13).

As to what all this means for our own archival practice in this class, I’m not completely certain. How can I give voice to a community to which I do not belong? How could I dramatize its history? How could I possibly ever “retell” its narrative? If anything, I hope the work we do would involve simply locating some narratives that have been long excluded from “the Archive.” While the SCL is in fact an “archive,” yes, does it somehow stand outside the institutional “Archive” to which Hartman makes reference throughout? If so, and in many many ways I believe it does, making those narratives more visible or audible or accessible might allow them to either “speak for themselves” or help the community to discover and use those narratives to their benefit. Youssef has consistently maintained that the work we do on the material from the SCL must and will somehow inform the community as it stands today. Though I am personally wary of “speculating” myself, the opportunity for others with a more deeply-rooted, intimate connection to this material might potentially (hopefully!) benefit.

Week 1 Prompts

1.     It was at first difficult for me to connect with the arc of Coleman’s narrative, mostly for the reasons Melanie outlined with Rob Nixon’s concept of “slow violence:” since Coleman’s “rage was a lifetime deep,” it took describing various, at times disjointed life events and observations to articulate the pain she accrued over decades in Watts (248). The easier story to digest is one of simply a few days of chaos and flames. On a second read, I was struck by the way Coleman structured the arc of this slow violence that I thought could be relevant to how we choose to structure our collection/project.
        She laid out how interpersonal and systemic iterations of racism slowly worked their way into her consciousness. As a young child, she was first struck by the personal, immediate effects of this violence, teachers giving preferential treatment to the white peers who called her “nigger” on the playground, while the concept of racism itself was somewhat beyond her, “amorphous, eluding [her] preadolescent expression” (249). Then, as a wave of disaffected Texan and Southern African Americans enveloped her class, she became overwhelmed by the “ignorance and race hate that smothered [her] love of learning” (250). After she begins to understand how these feelings impact a larger group beyond the individual, her understanding of the ‘slow violence’ moves to the systemic as she notices how funding is cut from her school and “Calculus, Greek, Latin, and Journalism were among the classes that disappeared from the curriculum” (254). Her description of Watts ‘65 is surprisingly brief, focused more on her personal upheaval and newfound expression than any attention-grabbing headline events. Her chronicling of slow violence evolves on the next page as she graduates from observations about her school system to South LA as a whole, observing widespread “economic disparity -as the unresolved issues of redlining, police brutality, poverty, and drugs continued to fester, and new, more voracious, youth gangs sprang from the asphalt” (255). We gain a broader and more nuanced understanding of the slow violence attending her community through Coleman’s evolution and broadening of scope over years of life experience.
      I thought this move could be instructive for structuring a type of narrative or frame within our project: moving from personal understanding, out to understanding of group and small systems, then out to the broader political and socio-economic factors at play in Watts ‘65. Perhaps we could start with stories from ‘65 or current day like Anthony’s and Kevin’s, ones of specific personal struggles under the weight of slow, systemic, even bureaucratic violence, then zooming out to glimpse the larger systems at work which produce this slow violence? Just a thought.

2.     As far as the mechanics of Hartman’s project to link a “counter history” of past events or individuals to a “history of the present,” I think it’s important to consider the questions she raises early on about enacting any kind of narrative structure around past events separate from the often sinister narrative of the archive that is intertwined with the “play of power” that in this case “murdered Venus and her shipmate and exonerated the captain” (10-11). Is crafting a narrative “its own gift and its own end” and when we do craft it, is it “for us or for them” (3)? This kind of critical self-reflection is key when enacting this kind of counter history using the tools of narrative. Hartman does stress emphatically that her intent is “not to give voice to the slave” but to advance “a series of speculative arguments…in fashioning a narrative, which is based on…a critical reading of the archive” based on the narrative structures and “figurative dimensions of history” (12, 11). This seems to involve an imaginative reconceptualization of her murdered Venus, what Amirhossein Vafa calls a “proleptic narrative,” in which one imagines what could have been possible had a subaltern voice not been silenced or made object (39). Hartman stresses that her narrative is instructive in creating the space for discussion regarding the silencing of this theoretical narrative, noting that she “intended both to tell an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility of its telling.” (11)
        The mechanics and applications of this counter history were frankly a little unclear to me. In a particularly academic way, at least to me, Hartman provides a lengthy preamble, justification, dissection, defense, and partial dismissal of her own imagining of a life for Venus. After composing it, she had to admit that all she really wanted was to console herself and “escape the slave hold with a vision of something other than the bodies of two girls settling on the floor of the Atlantic” (9). However, at the same time, she wonders out loud if “by retreating from the story of these two girls, was I simply upholding the rules of the historical guild and the ‘manufactured certainties’ of their killers, and by doing so, hadn’t I sealed their fate?” (10). After further mining the depths of her doubts, Hartman settles on this consolation, which seems to provide the most appropriate framework for enacting a narrative like this: “If this story of Venus has any value at all it is in illuminating the way in which our age is tethered to hers” since for her “a history of the present strives to illuminate the intimacy of our experience with the lives our now as it is interrupted by” or, at the very least, informed by “this past” (13, 4). In constructing this imagined past, Hartman seeks to speak to the violence, the erasure of black female voices both in our past and in our present. If by providing all of that context, she can clarify the goals of such an endeavor, it can (perhaps) rise above the status of fantasy or wish fulfillment for her audience.

Outside Work Cited:
Vafa, Amirhossein. “Call Me Fedallah: Reading a Proleptic Narrative in Moby Dick.”
Leviathan 16.3 (2014): 39-56. MLA. Web. 15 Jan. 2016.

3.     The Jet article on the lynching of Emmett Till provides a far more detailed counter history to its brief, detached equivalent in the New York Times. Other than the use of the word “slain” to describe Emmett Till’s death, the New York Times article seems to go far out of its way to sanitize and thoroughly decontextualize the incident from any history of violence against black bodies. Conspicuously absent are both the historical and emotional details used in the Jet article to incense their predominantly African American audience. The Jet article notes that this was the first lynching in the U.S. in four years, it provides strongly worded statements from the NAACP, the governor of Mississippi, a local newspaper editor, and the boy’s mother, and it gave gut-wrenching detail about the boy’s disfigured body along with the horrific image of his recovered body. In light of the Jet article, the brief blurb from the New York Times not only seems to downplay the numbers of mourners at his open casket funeral (though the true number in attendance could have been closer to the Time’s 10,000 than Jet’s 600,000, the NYT inclusion of the descriptor “mourners and curious” seems almost forcefully dismissive), it seems to subtly imply with its syntax that the boy “had it coming” when it notes that the body was found “three days after he reportedly whistled at a white woman in a Money store” (S9). Without the Jet article as a contemporary counter history, the myopic suppression of Emmett Till’s story might have succeeded in its erasure of the widespread impact of this event.